Kinship with strangers: adoption and interpretations of kinship in American culture

562 Pages·1994·1.26 MB·English

by  Judith Schachter Modell

Kinship With Strangers : Adoption and
title: Interpretations of Kinship in American
Culture
author: Modell, Judith Schachter.
publisher: University of California Press
isbn10 | asin:
print isbn13: 9780520081185
ebook isbn13: 9780585134949
language: English
Adoption--United States, Kinship--United
subject States, United States--Social life and
customs.
publication date: 1994
lcc: HV875.55.M64 1994eb
ddc: 362.7/34/0973
Adoption--United States, Kinship--United
States, United States--Social life and
States, United States--Social life and
subject:
customs.
Page iii
Kinship with Strangers
Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American
Culture
Judith S. Modell
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley / Los Angeles / London
Page iv
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press
London, England
Copyright © 1994 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Modell, Judith Schachter, 1941-
Kinship with strangers : adoption and interpretations of kinship
in American culture / Judith S. Modell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-08118-8 (alk. paper)
1. AdoptionUnited States. 2. KinshipUnited States.
3. United. StatesSocial life and customs. I. Title.
HV875.55.M64 1994
362.7´34´0973dc20 92-37617
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984
Page v
To my children, Jennifer and Matthew
Page vii
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 American Adoption: A Kinship with Strangers 1
Part One: The Setting: American Adoption Policy
2 In the Best Interests: The Background of American 19
Adoption Policy
3 This Child is Mine: The Mechanisms for Delegating 36
Parenthood
Part Two: The Experience of Adoptive Kinship
4 The White Flag of Surrender: Birthparent Experiences of 61
Adoption
5 Everyone Else Just Has Babies: Becoming an Adoptive 91
Parent
Page viii
6 The Chosen Child: Growing Up Adopted 115
Part Three: The Revision of Adoptive Kinship
7 Just My Truth: The Adoptee Search for a Birth Family 143
8 Lost to Adoption: The Birthparent Search for a 169
Relinquished Child
9 A Child of One's Own: Being an Adoptive Parent 200
Part Four: Conclusion
10 A New Kind of Kinship: The Implications of Change 225
in American Adoption
Notes 239
Bibliography 261
Index 275
Page ix
PREFACE
This book originates in and is representative of the interpretations of
the people I interviewed. With training in anthropology that included
a particular focus on kinship, I also began the project with a general
sense of the experience of adoption in the United States. As I began to
collect interviews, however, I realized how little I had brought those
two domains together and, by contrast, how effectively the people I
met had used their experiences of adoption to analyze kinship. The
people I interviewed are self-selected: if not members of a support
group (some were, others were not), they were all willing to examine
a complicated part of their lives with me. This did not mean they
spoke out because they had taken a critical stancethey may or may not
have. Rather, a critical stance and an analytic perspective emerged
from personal, digressive, uncertain, joyous, confident, and angry
anecdotes.
Virtually every interview with birthparent, adoptive parent, or adoptee
took well over two hours. In a majority of cases, I saw the person
several times, for further interviews, at group meetings, or at adoption
conferences. Our lives were not intertwinedmy work does not
represent classic "participatory" fieldworkbut people's interpretations
of kinship did emerge over time and in different settings. Although I
do write, at times, as if "all" birthparents, or adoptive parents, or
adoptees, experience adoptive kinship the same way, obviously that is
not true: members of the triad did not always agree with one another,
even when
Page x
their experiences had been similar and their attendance at support
group meetings equally faithful. Rather than present diverse points of
view, I have tried to convey the gist of the birthparent, the adoptive
parent, and the adoptee experience of this kind of kinship in late
twentieth-century American society. And though my argument mutes
the particularities of this experience, it is built out of the multiple
perspectives and positions individuals conveyed.
While writing, I did not always find it easy to resist the temptation to
let my interviews dominate the text. As it is, there are substantial
sections in which my voice gives way to their voices, not simply
because I succumbed to temptation but also (and primarily) because
the birthparents, adoptive parents, and adoptees I interviewed are the
"first order" analysts of the data. They were critical, and self-
consciously so, about the terms of their relationships. They were also
critical of the significance of "fictive" in being related. What is the
content of a relationship that reflects or simulates a real relationship?
The dichotomy of real and fictive (or "not real") pervades the
everyday experiences of members of the triad. The dichotomy is not
an abstraction or a theoretical point, but an aspect of daily interaction,
manifested in the variety of ways in which people clarified what they
meant by "real parent'' in conversations with me.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe the context of this kinship. These chapters
are somewhat different in approach from the subsequent chapters,
primarily because they depend more thoroughly on secondary sources
and on observer rather than participant analyses of adoptive kinship.
The chapters do, however, indicate the extent to which a century and a
half of developments in law and policy shape individual experiences
of adoption in the 1980s and 1990s. The material in chapters 2 and 3
constitutes the backdrop for the experiences and interpretations
foregrounded in chapters 4 through 9.
Embedded in discussions of adoption are cogent critiques of the
assumptions of a fictive kinship, of the significance of biology in
cultural interpretations of relationship, and of the importance of
"blood" for a person's identity. These are powerful issues. In addition,
almost everyone remarked on the lack of attention paid to adoption
when so much attention is paid to the related issues of abortion,
surrogacy, child abuse and neglect, and American family values. I
hope my book will correct that. For adoption is not just about parent-
child relationships, it is also about identity, "blood," culture, and
nature. Furthermore, it is about